by Mary Lou Butler
My best friend’s father called me scarecrow. He was shaped like a Basket Gourd, always adjusting his enormous jeans. I wore flannel shirts, sweatpants, my hair cut in a 1970s shag. Scarecrow: To startle. To screech.
I wanted to be genderless.
To protect my body from
boys, men, and love.
The handsomest boy in class held up a photo of a woman, from a fairytale, laughed out loud repeating my name. Buschi. Buschi. She was old and curvaceous. Hair a ratted nest.
A witch—a name by
implication, sexualized.
Burned with desire.
The fathers whispered, Lolita, while I was still barefoot turning cartwheels. That’s when I became uncuntable. A Cunt-Tess. A superheroine. While they sipped highballs on wrap around porches ogling a body, they thought they owned, I was working on a the blasphemous—A girl like me will write them down for who they were. Vapid. Frightened. A pain behind their hearts they had no name for.
Cuntress—Serving Cunt.
A one syllable slap – no. No
one knew I was wrecked.
Mary Lou Buschi has three poetry collections. Her third book, BLUE PHYSICS, 2024 (Lily Poetry Review) was a finalist for Contemporary Poetry in The International Book Awards. PADDOCK, 2021 (LPR) was nominated for The Four Quartets Prize. Her poems have appeared in literary journals such as Ploughshares, Glacier, Rhino, and Radar.
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